


1994

by pineapplecrushface



Series: Today is the greatest [2]
Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Richie Tozierness, Sex, Underage Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-01-21 16:16:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12461358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineapplecrushface/pseuds/pineapplecrushface
Summary: In the winter and spring of 1994, the forgetting has already started.





	1994

**Author's Note:**

> WCYY didn't actually start playing alternative rock until later in 1994, but I'm willing to pretend Derry is in some weird time warp because Richie Tozier needs to have had the CYY experience all the way through high school.
> 
> Also, now the It universe and the Tommyknockers universe timelines are concurrent, and that's great.

Over Christmas break, Eddie and his mother always visit her sisters in Portland. There are two of them and they pinch his cheeks as much now, at nearly eighteen, as they did when he was five.

"So cute," Aunt Frances says, pouring out an entire bowl of black jelly beans for him. He hates black jelly beans. In third grade he said they were his least favorite and his mother said black licorice had great healing properties and told everyone _Eddie just loves black licorice, it's so good for his stomach_. Every visit since then has been full of black jelly beans. The bowl seems to get both closer and farther away like a Hitchcock scene when Aunt Frances sets it on the table. 

"Tell me about your little friends," Aunt Muriel says. "Do you have a girlfriend yet?"

"Nowadays nobody goes on dates. They just _hang_." Eddie's mother says it like Eddie wants to actually be hanged – which, at the moment, he rather does.

"Still the same group?" Muriel nudges the jelly beans toward him and he tucks his hands under his thighs.

"Yes," his mother sighs. "Not nice boys, just the same dirty ones, but at least most of them have moved away."

For a moment Eddie has no idea what she's talking about. Who moved? 

"At least college..." Aunt Frances says. "Surely they can't all go to Southern Maine. Edward, where are your friends going to college?"

Eddie's still puzzling over who moved, and suddenly his mind is blank. All he can think is _I'm not going to Southern Maine. I'm going away. I'm getting out of here_.

"Um," he says. Friends? He's reaching hard and finding nothing.

"The nasty one with the glasses isn't going to school with him," his mother says.

Glasses. He almost gasps in relief. "Richie," he says. "He's going to Northeastern." 

Sometimes just being able to talk about Richie, even with his mother, makes him warm and shivery with pleasure. Especially if he's complaining about him – there's a special sort of feeling that comes with listing Richie's faults.

"He'll be far away from us," Eddie's mother says. 

"Only a couple of hours," Eddie adds. It's been a constant refrain between him and Richie since they started sending out college applications in the fall. That and Richie telling him to apply somewhere in Boston, anywhere. It'll be close to your mom, he says. Not close enough for her, Eddie says. But he has applied to a few in Boston, and he has a secret he hasn't even told Richie: he got into one of them. Now that Richie's on his mind he remembers that Mike is going to Orono and Bill is going into Southern Maine for the writing program and Eddie – Eddie is not going to any U of Maine school. Eddie is out of here. He'd happily never see Maine again, although he knows better than to think he'll ever be able to leave and not come back. The thought of his mother all alone in Derry, sitting in front of the television and pushing box after box of Entenmann's in her mouth, makes him alternately want to throw up and run away and cry. As much as he wants to, he could never do that to her. He has visions of someday owning his own shop – for what, he's not sure – and having a house down the street from his mother, a house where he and Richie can live without having to explain themselves to anyone. In California, Richie always says. He wants to learn how to surf. Eddie likes the idea of living somewhere warm, but mostly he likes the idea of living somewhere happy and safe with Richie, where they can be the way they are together all the time. He thinks sometimes that without Richie, he'd stop finding everything funny, and he'd turn into a shriveled little old man because he tends to burrow further and further down into himself to get through the day. He could drift into a state of nothingness very easily.

"Far enough away for you to make new friends," Eddie's mother says.

"Time enough for girlfriends once you're in college," Aunt Muriel says brightly. 

"We'll see about that," his mother says.

Yes, Eddie thinks, we will definitely see about that.

*

Sometimes he forgets what Richie looks like, even when Richie’s in the room with him. He doesn’t understand why it keeps happening when he loves Richie’s face as much as he does – not that he’d ever tell anyone, especially Richie himself. He’s already far too pleased with himself, and everything in Eddie pushes back against the idea that he’s something Richie thinks he’s good at.

Richie _is_ good at Eddie though, pretty much A+, and it pisses Eddie off. He’s meaner than he intends to be sometimes for that very reason, but he’s had a firm policy of never being nice to Richie Tozier since first grade and honestly, Richie seems to like it. Eddie spends most of his time with Richie despite barely tolerating him, and Richie seems to understand that for the outrageous statement of love that it is. When they’re sprawled out on Richie’s bed watching MTV at three in the morning on a Friday night and Richie’s wrapped around him like a big ugly octopus protecting its favorite shell from predators, the fact that Eddie never pushes him away is a silent message that he loves him more powerfully than he’s ever felt anything, fears and anxieties included. He doles out affection in a strict system of reward and punishment that he suspects only works as well as it does because Richie is a bottomless well of need. He wants to be touched all the time, but Eddie keeps himself tightly in check. He has to. If he let himself, he’d give Richie absolutely everything.

The forgetting makes it worse.

“Okay, this kid in Haven says he used to have a quantum displacement generator he made out of fucking egg crates and AA batteries,” Richie says, swinging around in his desk chair so Eddie, sitting on the bed and doing his Algebra II homework, can appreciate this new absurdity.

“I don’t know why you even bother talking to anyone from Haven,” Eddie says, not looking up from his book. “The radiation poisoning probably gave them brain tumors.”

“Normal people don’t get on this chat, Eds,” Richie says. “That would be so fucking boring. Like, what would you end up talking about with these tinfoil hats? They don’t care about the things we care about.”

“You know, it’s kind of sweet that you include yourself in the normal group,” Eddie says, and when Richie turns back to the chat room he’s always fucking around in, it happens again: Richie’s face is a blank to him.

It’s happened enough by now that the sharp spike of panic eases right away – or he forgets about it, anyway. _What was I…?_ he thinks, and remembers again.

“Rich,” he says, startled, and when Richie turns to him again it all flows back, all that fierce exasperated affection. He’s just so bizarre and irritating and Eddie loves him so fucking much. It bowls him over in such a powerful wave that he pushes aside his homework and his calculator, stands, and goes to Richie with his stomach fluttering and his hands already reaching for him.

Richie pulls him in by the hips, smiling up at him. “If I knew alien abduction freaks got you hot, I’d have started a UFO chat room years ago,” he says. Eddie wants to protest that he’s not hot, but he is, he always is, because Richie might be a loudmouth idiot but Eddie is weak for loudmouth idiots.

WCYY is playing. It’s always on in Richie’s room – hanging out with Richie involves a lot of music. Eddie, who is in fact more of a Blur or Elastica fan and puts up with a lot of shit from Richie about it, nevertheless appreciates the music turned way up as much as he appreciates the lock on Richie’s door. Richie’s parents aren’t like his mother and they would knock if the door was closed, but knocking wouldn’t matter at all when he and Richie are really into it.

Richie has five different “Eddie” mixtapes: a mellow one for hanging out, one for when he’s feeling sweet, one for new shit he thinks Eddie should listen to, one full of general favorites that are always on when they’re playing video games, and one optimistically entitled “BONING” that Eddie thinks his body is conditioned to get off to at this point. When he’s thirty he’s pretty sure he’ll still get hard at the opening notes of “Today” because it will always bring him back to Richie’s bed, writhing completely out of his mind under his weight, fingers pulling hard on his hair and forcing Richie to kiss him the way he wants it, Richie’s hands on his ass urging him to rock up faster, faster. Richie – warm mouth on his neck, clever fingers unzipping his pants, stroking him hard to a screaming kicking orgasm before the song’s bridge – has a way with making him remember music.

Eddie was allowed to bring his own makeout mix tape exactly one time. Halfway through “Black,” Richie lifted his head and said, “I cannot fuck to this song. It makes me want to jump off a bridge.”

Eddie propped himself up on his elbows and glared down at him. “Now you know how I feel about Cowboy Junkies. Suck it up.”

The next night “Sweet Jane” was replaced with “Supernova,” which was the last song on Eddie’s mix tape. Richie has not, however, let Eddie surprise him with music since then. As he often says, life is too short to get dicked to Pearl Jam.

Sometimes Eddie brings the mixtapes home with him so he can listen to them when he’s falling asleep. He likes to wonder what Richie was thinking about him that made him decide on this or that song. Why Portishead? Why that Peter Gabriel song and not another one? He knows why Richie included Depeche Mode; “Enjoy the Silence” is burned into his brain forever because it was playing the first time Richie said _Please please let me suck your dick, I’m going crazy_ , and Eddie almost broke his arm again in his haste to let him. He’s just surprised Richie remembers things like that– or he used to be surprised, anyway. He knows that nothing about music is casual for Richie, and that these are his love letters.

Right now the radio is low enough that it’s not covering any noises and he really kind of likes it. Richie’s parents are at work for another two hours and there’s nothing to worry about, and even though his own moaning is embarrassing, it’s worth it to listen to Richie. Eddie is pretty sure this is Richie’s favorite way to get off, sitting with Eddie straddling him. They’re close enough that he can still see Eddie even without his glasses, and even though he never really talks about it Eddie knows that’s important to him. He hates his glasses, hates that they get in the way and that without them he can’t tell what’s going on, but he hates having them removed even more.

“You look like a big innocent baby,” Eddie said one time, looking down into his face and touching it wonderingly. All his sharpness disappeared the moment he took his glasses off and he was new and different, soft. Eddie felt like he was closer to some part of him that Richie kept very carefully covered up.

“The next time they get lost in your mom’s fat folds when I’m going down on her I’ll let you know,” Richie snapped. He was pissed, Eddie thought. Well, of course he was. Who would like being uncovered like that? Eddie could see he was about to say something else, so he told him to shut up and kissed the bridge of his nose and his eyelids and his unhappy mouth. Eddie had never seen him like that before and filed it away as he does every weird little thing about Richie’s weird little mind.

It’s always like that, the first moment when Richie takes his glasses off and throws them on the desk. He gets disoriented and annoyed for a second and then rebounds. By now, Eddie knows exactly why it bothers him. Whatever is in there, whatever he doesn’t want to be uncovered, it's very serious and quiet and emotional, not just about Eddie but about everything. Eddie thinks he must hate to have anyone see that, and that’s how he knows Richie Tozier loves him.

All of a sudden Richie grabs him under the thighs and stands up, barely holding his weight for two steps before dropping to his knees and pressing Eddie down onto the floor. Eddie, who definitely shrieked and is not about to admit it anytime soon, is sputtering with irritated laughter even before Richie sticks his face in his neck and tickles him.

“Get off me, you fucking buffoon,” he says, pushing at him but, to be fair, not particularly hard.

“We shall fight in the oceans,” Richie says, muffled into his neck. “We shall fight in the fields.”

“I swear to god, if you Winston Churchill me I will never fuck you again.”

“We shall never–”

“I’m serious,” Eddie says. “No more. You get nothing. Welcome to permanent masturbation, fuckface.”

Richie’s giggling helplessly as he lifts himself up to hover over Eddie. His flannel shirt, unbuttoned, hangs around them both and it seems like he’s surrounded by Richie – this madly grinning idiot who is all eyes and hair and flannel and corduroy, whose face Eddie has loved, if he’s being honest, since first grade when he decided he could never be nice to him.

“What if I play Winston and you play Franklin,” Richie says, moving his eyebrows up and down in what would be a hubba-hubba gesture if Richie could move both eyebrows at the same speed.

“What if you play Winston and I play the British people and fire you,” Eddie says.

“I could be into that,” Richie says. “Come on, babe, fire me.”

“I’ll fire you in the dick,” Eddie says, not even knowing what that means exactly but liking the way it makes Richie laugh. In the middle of laughing, Richie kisses him again and sinks down to press tight between his thighs. Eddie moans into his mouth and wraps around him and then wishes he weren’t so easy – and then, in a small part of his brain, he’s glad that he is. He loves this; in a few minutes Richie will start pulling Eddie’s clothes off and then it’s anybody’s guess what he’ll do to him, but it will feel good and Eddie loves it, he loves Richie and he loves being laid out under him or riding him, as long as he gets his brains fucked out wherever they happen to end up. He feels like he could tear apart the bed or Richie or even his own body with his nails and his teeth because whatever it is that happens between them is so fucking big. It seems to come from outside of either of them, through them.

“Hi,” Richie says in the middle of it, right when Eddie’s at that point where he can’t fucking deal with it and is arching up and pulling really hard on Richie’s hair because he needs to expend some of this thing, this pleasure that feels like it’s going to blow off the top of his head.

“Hi,” he gasps.

“Look at me,” Richie says. “Look, okay?”

He looks, trying to memorize every single small thing about this moment to keep it with him forever. Even when he’s so close he can’t think and he’s getting pulled under by the slow, smooth movement of Richie’s hips, the only thing he ever does with any patience, Eddie keeps looking. Richie’s hair is sticking up everywhere and he’s sweaty and he’s making the short, desperate noises that mean he’s really out of control and is about to come any second, the noises Eddie sometimes remembers with a rush of trembling lust at inconvenient times, and there’s a voice in the back of his head – not his own voice, but a deeper one, a voice he almost recognizes – that’s telling him _remember this_. But how could he forget it? It couldn’t happen, he thinks, and then Richie reaches down between them to stroke him and he’s gone.

*

Eddie usually can’t remember the first time. Once in a while he stumbles over the memory and gets caught up in parts of it, but he loses it again almost immediately. He and Richie have been a thing for so long, who can even remember? It doesn’t really matter, after all.

Eddie was never sure what possessed him to finally kiss Richie’s stupid big mouth after wanting to do it for months while also hating himself for wanting to do it. Logically, he thought, if he liked boys that way, he probably should have liked Bill. Bill was handsome and brave and Eddie would have died for him without even thinking about it, but Eddie had never wanted to kiss him. There was no weird thrill in his stomach when he saw Bill the way there was when he saw Richie, which just made no sense at all because Richie drove him _crazy_. And not in a nice way – if he had put the amount of time and effort into his schoolwork that he had into daydreaming over the years about just smacking Richie across his stupid face, he’d have already graduated from college.

But by the beginning of that summer, the one he hardly thought about, all of that had mostly faded away. Not that Richie became less annoying – if anything he was worse – but Eddie stopped hating it. And Richie was always really nice in between annoyances. That was why they were all friends with him; he could make you want to push him in front of a moving car and then three minutes later he’d share a chocolate bar with you and make you die laughing at something nobody else would notice. By the time school ended that year Eddie thought it was strange that when Richie rested his head on Eddie’s shoulder while they were watching a movie, which he always did, everything in the world was suddenly pretty great, and by the time Richie signed his cast _Good luck jerking it with your left hand_ , Eddie knew that he liked him.

And honestly he was pretty fucking annoyed by it. It would have been understandable if it were Ben or Mike or Stan. None of them had ever sworn that they could make the nice watch he’d gotten as a birthday present disappear and reappear again and only succeeded in disappearing it forever. None of them had gotten Eddie grounded, at last count, thirty-seven times. None of them had decided he was a fucking doctor and could snap a greenstick fracture back into place – but then none of them had held him while he cried until he was almost hysterical out of pain and fear afterward either, and none of them had completely ignored Eddie’s mother’s orders and sneaked into his room to see him anyway. That was Richie all over.  

He thought after that day, after the house on Neibolt Street, that he probably loved Richie. He didn’t bother to hide it. There wasn’t any point; for a little while he tried not to touch him, but then Richie got even farther into his space and made it worse, holding his hand and tickling him and giving him noogies and wet willies. It got noticeable enough for Stan to finally say, “Jesus Christ, Richie, will you leave him alone?” surprising both of them. Richie looked confused and upset, and Eddie bumped his shoulder and said, “Yeah, asshole, cut it out,” but pinched him to let him know it was okay. And that afternoon when Richie put an arm around him and then seemed to think better of it, Eddie held onto it, leaning against him.

So maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised that he kissed Richie after all, but he was and is still surprised Richie wanted to kiss him back. He still doesn’t really know why but assumes it’s got something to do with the fact that Richie is kind of a contrary dickhead.

They spent the first two months of that school year in a constant fog of making out. He was afraid to do anything more than that – later he will definitely remember that feeling, the petrified desire to push Richie onto his back and climb on top of him, or to slide his hands down and touch him…anywhere, really. His imagination was vivid and he knew Richie probably, maybe, _hopefully_ wanted to touch him too, but he couldn’t ask. Richie might laugh at him and he really could not fucking take that, and anyway Richie hadn’t mentioned it either, and that most likely meant Richie didn’t want to because since when did Richie not say whatever he wanted to say, ever?

They probably would have gone on like that for months, but one day in late November, Moose Sadler knocked him down the steps outside the school. At that point Henry Bowers had already been dragged off to Juniper Hill and the bullying had simmered down to a dull roar, but the big kids would still go after you if they were in the mood and you happened to be there. On that particular day Moose was in the mood and Eddie happened to be there.

It wasn’t as bad as it would have been before that summer. Before, Henry probably would have taken his bookbag and thrown it into the Canal. Moose just slammed into him coming out of the building and he flew down the seven steps and landed on his hands and knees at the bottom, tearing his jeans and ripping up his palms.

“What the hell?” he cried. He’d only gotten out of his cast two weeks before, and he was constantly worried something was going to put him back in it.

“ _What the hell_?” Moose replied, his voice high-pitched and his mouth pursed. He hovered over Eddie like he was about to kick him, but Eddie stood up fast, ready to run.

“Why did you do that?” Eddie asked.

“Why are you such a fucking little girl?” Moose said. “Little fucking girly baby faggo.”

He seemed to think that was all the response Eddie’s question required, and stomped off into the cold late afternoon with a final slushball thrown at Eddie’s back. Eddie walked to Richie’s house as always, and after he’d washed and disinfected his hands and knees, they settled into kissing on Richie’s bed. Eddie was always hopeful that Richie would just move closer one day, press him down onto the bed, kiss him harder, and he spent the entire time they were kissing getting himself excited at the thought. This afternoon, however, he kept thinking about what Moose had said.

It was hardly the first time someone had called him a girl or a baby or a faggo. That was pretty much Belch Huggins’s entire vocabulary. As he was walking to Richie’s house, however, a terrible thought had occurred to him and no matter how he tried to push it away, it kept surfacing even as he tried to relax and enjoy being kissed on the neck, which was usually his favorite.

After a while, Richie pulled away and sat up, wiping his mouth. “I’m sorry, am I boring you?”

Eddie shook his head, feeling like he was going to burst at the seams. Something about what he was thinking must have shown on his face, because Richie grabbed his hand.

“Are you still thinking about Moose? That fat fuck can barely say his own name.”

“Yeah, kind of,” he said, and took a deep shaky breath. “Are you – do you like me because you think I’m like a girl?”

“What the fuck?” Richie asked.

“I mean, are you just kissing me, or – or like, _practicing_ on me, because I’m…” He hadn’t even expected to start crying, but all of a sudden his face was scrunching up and yes, there it was, he was definitely crying. He pulled his hand out of Richie’s grasp and rolled over so he was on his stomach, hiding his face in his arms, feeling stupid and overheated and miserable. He always ruined everything. Why did he always have to pick everything to death? Why couldn’t he just leave one single thing alone and let it be nice?

He felt the bed rocking as Richie shifted closer, turning him so he could put both arms around him and pull him close. Eddie tried not to be comforted by it, but somewhere along the way Richie had turned into the greatest comfort in his life – bizarre but true. Being in Richie’s arms was the best place he could think of to be, even when he was crying for no good reason and getting snot everywhere, and he didn’t even have a pack of tissues because he was pretty sure Richie had taken his last one to mop up some Kool-Aid.

“You’re such a fucking dumbass,” Richie murmured tenderly, rubbing his back.

“I am not,” he said, rubbing his eyes. God, he was going to have such a head cold. He always got one when he cried in the winter.

Richie drew away a little and pried Eddie’s hands from his face, using the cuff of his sleeve to dry his eyes. “You’re a _huge_ dumbass,” he said. “Did you think I just forgot you have a dick?”

“I don’t know,” he said, slapping his hands away when Richie’s sleeve caught him right in the eyeball. “I don’t know why you like me.”

Richie settled for tapping at his nose until Eddie caught his hand and made him stay still. He wriggled away and then got close enough again to kiss Eddie’s cheek. “I don’t care if you’re girly or like, super manly. Like if you went on steroids and got super jacked and needed to shave five times a day, I would still like you.”

Eddie shook his head, wondering how Richie always found it so easy to just blurt out everything that was in his head. He tried to do it sometimes and then felt stupid and agonized over it all night. “But _why_?” he asked, and knew instantly that this was one of the things he’d be agonizing over.

“I don’t know,” Richie said. “I just do. I like you and your dick.”

“What if I didn’t have one?” Eddie asked.

“Sure, whatever,” Richie said. “But I know you do, we’ve gone swimming together like a million times.”

“You don’t care at all?”

Richie rolled his eyes. “No. I just want to kiss you.”

Eddie had found himself winding his fingers in Richie’s shirt, and held onto it tight. “What about…other stuff?” he asked.

Richie’s face went red. “Other stuff?” he asked, his voice cracking. “Like shit I’ve done to your mom stuff?”

“If you talk about my mom, this conversation is over,” Eddie said.

“Fine, fine,” Richie said hastily. “I promise never to talk about your mom when there’s…stuff happening. But like, _what_ other stuff?”

“Well,” Eddie said, facing him like he always did when they kissed. “You like to kiss me this way, right? But what if you were like this.”

He pulled Richie closer so their legs were entangled and Richie was mostly on top of him. “Fucking ingenious,” Richie said, leaning down to kiss him, and that was the end of all Eddie’s concerns about just kissing.

He won’t remember everything about that afternoon – or, in fact, most of the time between killing the clown and graduating from high school; his mind seemed to sweep up everything behind him as he went – until nearly twenty-seven years later, in Richie’s room at the Derry Town House (“I was just thinking about the time you finally admitted you wanted to tap this,” Richie will say, and Eddie will remember the whole thing in a rush that hurts almost as badly as his arm will later). But sometimes when Richie looks at him a certain way he thinks there’s something he’s missing. Something important. _How did we get here_? he thinks, and then Richie’s face is clear to him again and he forgets whatever he was worrying about.


End file.
